One-strike proposal reveals limits of the law

By HUBERT G. LOCKE, SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, August 30, 2007

OK, let's start the conversation at a point at which everyone likely will agree -- a person who kidnaps, rapes and murders a child is the lowest, most despicable form of the human species. With this established, the question remains: What should we do with people who commit such horrid crimes?

A society must try, as best it can, to protect itself against all sorts of pathological individuals who prey on other people. It must especially try to safeguard its young who are more vulnerable and less able to defend themselves from the depravity of those who would harm them. It is not surprising that in response to an especially heinous case of child molestation and murder, such as that which occurred in Tacoma last month, the public outcry is immense and all sorts of draconian punishments are proposed. One's first impulse likely is to be supportive of the harshest of the measures; no penalty would seem to be too severe for such disgusting offenders.

The proposal for a one-strike law in such cases is one of a number of remedies that has been proposed for dealing with child predators. Every proposed punishment or safeguard, however, presents added problems -- sufficient to convince me, at least, that there are no simple answers to this dreadful problem.

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The state of Georgia, for example, has a new sex offender registry law that its politicians tout as the toughest in the nation. Offenders are required to register their addresses and are forbidden to live within 1,000 feet of a school, day care center, church, swimming pool or school bus stop. Because of the law, an offender who was unable to register an address because he is homeless is facing a life term in prison. His first violation occurred when he missed an earlier deadline to register and was sentenced to two years probation. A second violation of the registry law carries an automatic life sentence.

In California, in contrast, a judge issued a restraining order on a pedophile that prohibits him from coming closer than 10 yards to any minor in the entire state. The restraining order has been described as constituting basically house arrest or expulsion from California. It accomplishes, with one person, what the state of Georgia has set out to do with an entire offender class -- force sex offenders to leave the state.

We face the prospect of either finding some workable answers to what is clearly a national problem or of promoting devices that will simply move offenders around from one state to another. The one-strike proposal, at first glance, would appear to be the magic bullet. It would take sex offenders off the streets just as soon and as fast as they can be identified, charged and convicted. Justice would appear to be swift, certain and effective.

What the one-strike proposal does, however, is demonstrate the limits of the law in dealing with problems of this nature. For openers, there's the difficulty of determining precisely what sexual conduct ought to be sanctioned by a one-strike law. "Child molestation," for example, covers a wide swath of sexual activity; the state of Georgia is still trying to deal with the fallout from the 10-year prison sentence of a 17-year-old who was convicted for engaging in consensual sexual misbehavior with a 15-year-old.

(Largely because of this case, the Georgia Legislature subsequently has defined most offenses involving consensual sexual acts between teenagers as misdemeanors, but the new legal standard was not made retroactive and the 17-year-old offender, an honors student and a star athlete while in high school, has refused a deal offered by the prosecuting attorney that would reduce his sentence but require him to register as a sex offender and subject him to the restrictions of the new "toughest in the nation" state sex registry law.)

There is an added problem that a one-strike law would exacerbate. Those who study the sex offender problem report that 80 percent of offenders are people who are known to and trusted by their victims. A one-strike law would only increase the pressure on victims not to report assaults because of the harsh consequences.

We are left then with a frightful societal problem, but any simple solution to it -- especially one, as someone has said regarding another issue, "that makes us feel comforted and virtuous" -- seems bound to be an illusion. We can only hope that the coolest heads possible prevail in the search for answers.